Looking for the name of an old-school, plaintext Mac setup system
December 13, 2012 3:11 PM Subscribe
Please help me track down an article (or documentation) about an OS9 Mac setup regime that was heavily text-based, emphasizing how to set up a Mac with keyboard macros, desktop-accessible text snippets and very specific keyboard macros.
I read an article at some point in the last 15 years or so about a company with a very prescriptive setup process for employees using Mac desktops. It placed a heavy emphasis on using plain text, programming keyboard shortcuts or macros to accomplish common tasks.
The person who wrote up this workflow may have named it something like "The Good Desktop" or "Better Desktop" or somesuch, but I wouldn't face a firing squad over that detail.
I thought I remembered reading about it in Wired, but inurl:searches haven't netted me anything. If I had to pin it down in time, I'd guess it came up during the Danny O'Brien-fueled plain text/lifehacks mania that swept through the 'net ca. 2004, since it would have seemed very much like a precursor to that.
I read an article at some point in the last 15 years or so about a company with a very prescriptive setup process for employees using Mac desktops. It placed a heavy emphasis on using plain text, programming keyboard shortcuts or macros to accomplish common tasks.
The person who wrote up this workflow may have named it something like "The Good Desktop" or "Better Desktop" or somesuch, but I wouldn't face a firing squad over that detail.
I thought I remembered reading about it in Wired, but inurl:searches haven't netted me anything. If I had to pin it down in time, I'd guess it came up during the Danny O'Brien-fueled plain text/lifehacks mania that swept through the 'net ca. 2004, since it would have seemed very much like a precursor to that.
This thread is closed to new comments.
It was the "Good Easy" environment, covered by Wired, September 2001. The real link to the setup document is dead, but here's a Wayback version from 2001.
posted by mph at 3:18 PM on December 13, 2012